In 1994, the Japanese Patent Office granted Sato Shigeaki a patent for sardine-flavored ice cream. In his patent application, Shigeaki explained that his intention was to to promote the fishing industry by encouraging children who don't like fish to eat them. He also provided the basic recipe for his sardine ice cream. It involved cooking the sardines with onions, soybeans, rice wine, and walnut paste. Then adding this concoction to a base of chocolate ice cream.
This patent enjoys a somewhat unusual distinction. In 1997, European patent examiner Bernard Delporte revealed that it was the most common search request received by his office. He added, "No one believes that it actually exists until they've called it up and seen it themselves."
However, further research reveals that sardine ice cream was just the tip of the iceberg of Sato Shigeaki's grand vision. Apparently he imagined using oddball ice cream flavors to boost a broad range of different industries. As seen by the other patents he was granted:
Patent JPH08275731A: White Cedar Ice Cream
PURPOSE: To enable sales of an ice cream in different types of industries such as the lumber industry and the paper-manufacturing industry, to promote activation of enterprises and to sell the ice cream as a prescribed commodity as a local product by combining white ceder as a tree with ice cream to develop an epoch-making food.
CONSTITUTION: This ice cream is obtained by mixing a naturally extracted edible white ceder spice with an ice cream, mixing a pie dough with an edible white ceder spice, baking the mixture to give a pie, grinding the pie and mixing the flour with an ice cream or combining these ice creams with a designed cake forming a leaf or a twig of white ceder.
JPH06233656A: Sunflower Ice Cream
PURPOSE: To obtain an ice cream of sunflower as a local product.
CONSTITUTION: An ice cream base comprising honey of sunflower is mixed with a sunflower paste prepared by making seeds of sunflower into a paste to give an ice cream. The ice cream is topped with a material obtained by mixing seeds of sunflower roasted by an oven with caramel to give the objective ice cream of sunflower.
JPH11137180A: Salmon Ice Cream
PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To obtain salmon-contg. ice cream by mixing salmon in ice cream, and to provide a method for producing the above dessert, intended to offer a new commodity using salmon in the districts noted therefor and accomplished by proposing a technology to lower the freezing temperature of salmon and a second technology to remove the fishy smell inherent in salmon.
SOLUTION: This salmon-contg. ice cream is obtained by mixing salmon flesh boiled with alcohol during ice cream production process followed by chilling (freezing) the resultant mixture.
JPH06217700A: Chinese noodle seasoned with miso ice cream
PURPOSE: To provide a tasty ice cream-based Chinese noodle seasoned with miso intended to activate the relevant market as well as furnish consumers with joyfulness.
CONSTITUTION: Raw noodles are boiled with cow milk and then put into chilled cow milk and cooled. The resultant cooled noodles are boiled with a liquor comprising 80wt.% alcohol, 10wt.% miso and 10wt.% pig bone soup and infiltrated with the alcohol followed by cooling again. The resultant noodles are mixed with an ice cream base which has been separately prepared by incorporating an ice cream base with miso, followed by chilling, thus obtaining the objective ice cream-based Chinese noodles seasoned with miso.
JPH06217699A: Chinese noodle seasoned with soy ice cream
PURPOSE: To provide a tasty ice cream based Chinese noodle seasoned with soy intended to activate the relevant market as well as furnish consumers with joyfulness.
CONSTITUTION: Raw noodles are boiled with cow milk and then put into chilled cow milk and cooled. The resultant cooled noodles are boiled with a liquor comprising 80wt.% alcohol, 5wt.% of soy and 15wt.% seasoned shark fin soup and infiltrated with the alcohol followed by cooling again. The resultant noodles are mixed with an ice cream base which has been separately prepared by incorporating an ice cream base with a seasoned shark fin soup, followed by chilling, thus obtaining the objective ice cream-based Chinese noodles seasoned with soy.
JPH0998722A: Silk ice cream
PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To produce silk-contained ice cream perceivable by tongue and eyes that the ice cream contains silk by mixing silk, which is good for health, into ice cream and the unbaked dough of pie, and further spraying silk powder over the baked pie to lay it on the ice cream.
SOLUTION: Silk powder is added and mixed into ice cream base commercial or originally blended which has been sterilized by heating and cooled. Pie dough is also compounded with silk powder, and it is formed into a shape of a silk worm or a cocoon and baked. The pie is placed on ice cream. Silk powder is sprayed over the pie. This enables one to clearly perceive that the pie has silk and to directly taste the silk powder.
JPH08277399A: Cypress flavor for food
PURPOSE: To obtain a cypress flavor for food, having excellent deliciousness, taste and palatability and useful for the preparation of a cake, etc., by adding water to cypress wood chips, heating the chips to distill out a liquid component and removing the water from the liquid by evaporation.
CONSTITUTION: This cypress flavor is produced by adding water to cypress wood chips preferably mixed with false arborvitae wood chips, heating the chips to distill out a liquid component and removing water from the liquid by evaporation.
JPH06233655A: Beer ice cream
PURPOSE: To obtain an ice cream of beer taste having a mellowness and pleasantness to the palate.
CONSTITUTION: The alcohol degree of beer is weakened and mixed with a fresh cream, whole powder milk and a stabilizer so as to prevent the beer from becoming a sherbet state and blended with an ice cream base to give a beer ice.
JPH06343397A: Japanese rice wine ice cream
PURPOSE: To obtain a tasty ice cream having the taste of Japanese rice wine.
CONSTITUTION: The ice cream is obtained by adding SAKE (Japanese rice wine) lees to an ice cream base composed of sugar, cow's milk, an egg, fresh cream, skim milk powder, glucose and a stabilizer and cooling the resultant mixture.
Artist Alex Stenzel not only invented a cucumber sandwich, but in 2006 he managed to obtain a patent for it. It's a design patent, but a patent nonetheless.
His idea was to hollow out a cucumber and stuff it with ingredients. He then used one end of the cucumber to plug up the other stuffed side. He called this a 'gorilla sandwich'.
The site dailytitan.com offers some details about how Stenzel came up with his idea:
artist and philosopher, Alex Stenzel, 44, of Pacific Palisades, Calif., has developed a new kind of breadless sandwich that has taken the raw food community by storm. Stenzel's invention, known as the 'Gorilla Sandwich,' substitutes traditional sliced bread for a hollowed-out cucumber filled with kale, olives, mustard greens, walnuts and avocado - among other healthy ingredients.
The name 'Gorilla Sandwich,' according to Stenzel, was chosen after researching gorillas and discovering their diet consists of many greens that are high in protein.
"I'm very much into health," Stenzel said. "I've always been playing around with different types of herbs and different kinds of vegetables."
Stenzel, who is originally from an industrial area in Germany, came across this idea when confronted with a choice: eat his salad at home or store it inside a hollowed-out cucumber to make it portable enough to take to the beach with him. For Stenzel, who is a surfing enthusiast, the answer was obvious, and he was soon off to the beach to 'kiss the waves,' as he calls it, with his new edible invention. Stenzel also has had a world ranking for three different sports: tennis, mountain biking and the Iron Man World Championships in Hawaii in 1986.
"To reach the highest performance level possible, I experimented with different healthy diets," he said.
Stenzel has posted a series of videos on YouTube that provide complete instructions on how you can make your own gorilla sandwich.
Invented in the late 1970s by Vincent Siano and his cousin Nicholas Piazza. They named it the Tarottells Machine. However, it doesn't seem to have ever made it onto store shelves. So, for now, tarot readers remain unthreatened by the automation that has swept other industries.
Nicholas Piazza with the Tarottells Machine
Some details about the Tarottells Machine from an AP News story by Kay Bartlett (June 11, 1978 in the Allentown Morning Call):
Siano and Piazza have high hopes for their Tarottells Machine, an invention that so excites Vinnie, the spokesman, that he likes to take off his jacket and stand as he describes it.
Siano, an artist at Grumman Aircraft and a textbook illustrator, rises to lyrical heights demonstrating his machine: "This is the first time in the history of the world — the first Tarot machine. Automation has come to Tarot..."
The machine, with cursor and compass, has a custom carrying case. The game is made of black plastic and bright orange Tarot cards and measures some 27 inches square.
You get the cards' message by pressing a lever to cut the cards three times to the left — mandatory procedure in Tarot. Then they spin around until another lever activates a silver pointer that singles out the card.
"We have also incorporated astrology to get the best possible reading," says Siano, whipping out a tray of beautifully drawn figures of the Zodiac. "And we have also adopted ESP into this machine.
"You'll get a better answer from this than any Ouija Board. What we need is a dynamic corporation that has the guts to turn this thing out."
Siano says a big toy manufacturer had the machine in its vaults for six weeks, but the man who thought it a good idea was fired and the machine was returned.
Carl Kusch of Germany invented a way that a person would never be without a saw when they needed one, because the saw could be worn around their neck at all times. From his 1909 patent:
This invention relates to a saw which can be worn on the dress or on the person and is also provided with a frame adapted to serve as a guard.
The invention consists in a flexible saw frame convertible at any time by suitable means into a rigid frame and which is so constructed that the saw blade can be put into the frame in the known manner, when the saw is used as a tool, or be fixed to the flat side of the frame when the frame is used as a guard. In the latter case the frame of the saw protects the dress or the body from contact with the saw blade.
Kusch evidently had high hopes for his invention, because he obtained patents for it in the United States, Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. Although in his patent he never explained who he thought was going to buy the thing. The military, I'm guessing, because it seems designed to be part of a German soldier's uniform. Although as far as I know, no army ever outfitted its soldiers with this thing.
In 1980, Charles Laleman of France received a US patent (No. 4,203,674) for a technique for making concrete by mixing together cement with blood. His patent described a variety of different recipes one could use to create this blood concrete. For instance:
EXAMPLE 1
A light colloidal concrete is prepared by using:
a commercially available cement (cement CPA 400), a silico-calcareous sand graded no higher than 0.8 mm (the cement/sand mass ratio being equal to 1), whole blood powder of animal origin, a colloid, and mixing water in variable proportions.
The various constituents are mixed by means of a mixer working between 100 and 600 r.p.m.
The advantage of using blood, Laleman argued, was that the oxygen in it produced a lighter concrete.
Curiously, Laleman acknowledged that the idea of using blood to make concrete wasn't in any way new. He cited a variety of earlier patents, such as US patent 1,020,325 from 1912 which described mixing blood into concrete. And, in fact, the technique of using blood to make concrete was even practiced by the ancient Romans.
What made Laleman's technique unique (and therefore patentable) was apparently that he used it specifically to lighten the concrete, rather than to color it or to make it more porous. That seems like a rather fine distinction to me, but it was enough to earn him a patent.
Laleman's list of earlier patents includes another oddity. He refers to US Patent No. 3,536,507 (from 1970) which describes making concrete by combining cement with "an admixture which is derived from the fermentation liquor resulting from the aerobic fermentation of liquid carbohydrates, e.g., molasses from beet or cane sugar, corn, wheat or wood pulp." That sounds like a fancy way of saying they were mixing cement with beer.
Sometimes vendors would like to sell relatively high-value items in vending machines. That is, merchandise worth more than a candy bar. Nowadays that's not a problem because there's technology that can scan paper currency or read credit cards, making larger transactions possible.
But back in the 1960s, vending machines relied on coins for payment, so selling high-value merchandise wasn't practical. Especially since the machines could only measure weight, shape, and size to determine if the coins were real — and these characteristics are easy to fake with low-value blanks.
The British printing company Thomas de la Rue devised a solution: radioactive vending machine tokens.
Its researchers realized it would be possible to create tokens made out of layers of radioactive materials such as uranium and carbon14. These tokens would emit unique radioactive signatures that could be measured by Geiger counters inside a vending machine. Such tokens wouldn't be easy to forge. The company patented this idea in 1967.
I'm not aware that any vending machines accepting radioactive tokens were ever put into to use.
I imagine they would have suffered from the same problem that plagued other efforts to put radiation to practical, everyday use — such as the radioactive golf balls we posted about a few months ago (the radiation made it possible to find the balls if lost). The radiation from one token (or golf ball) wasn't a health hazard, but if a bunch of them were stored together, then the radiation did become a problem.
In the early 1930s, a new feature was introduced at some greyhound races: monkey jockeys. Apparently the crowds loved the idea. The problem was, the monkeys had trouble staying on the backs of the greyhounds. Animal trainer Rennie Renfro came up with a solution — a special harness that would tie the monkey onto the back of the dog. Renfro patented his invention in 1933.
It probably made him some money, because I can find descriptions of races with monkey jockeys for decades afterwards.
Rennie Renfro (left) and his wife St. Louis Post Dispatch - July 2, 1933
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.